Praise for Constellation
“Stellar… the stories of disparate people pulled together, like stars into orbit, by the force of one tragic moment. Like all great novels, Constellation works in ever expanding circles… a meditation on chance, destiny, and the faults that lie sometimes in ourselves and sometimes in our stars” Wall Street Journal
“Slender yet ambitious… echoing such classics as Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Ernest K. Gann’s Fate Is the Hunter… a profound meditation on the far-reaching interconnectedness of tragic events” Publishers Weekly
“At once ambitious and accomplished in both narrative and prose style… somewhere between novel, historical investigation and homage, Constellation sparkles… Bosc goes about his investigation with great sensitivity… finds signs, symmetries which illuminate and join the dots between these forty-eight stars snuffed out on 27 October 1949” Le Figaro
“Bosc adapts the story in a subtle and contemporary way to the thread of his obsessions… an unsolvable investigation in which the fictional conflicts at every step with the real” Liberation
“Clear, chromed, spare… Bosc has unearthed all the secrets, yet swirls around this steel tomb as if its enigma were inexhaustible. As if Lockheed Constellation F-BAZN were still charting its course to who knows where” Nouvel Observateur
ADRIEN BOSC was born in Avignon in 1986. He is the founder of Éditions du sous-sol and the magazines Desports and Feuilleton. Constellation is his first novel.
CONSTELLATION
by Adrien Bosc
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
by Willard Wood
This book is supported by the Institut français (Royaume-Uni) as part of the Burgess programme
This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s PEN Translates! programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3 Holford Yard
Bevin Way
London
WCIX 9HD
www.serpentstail.com
First published in French as Constellation by Editions Stock, Paris, 2014
Epigraph on page vii translated from the Italian by Tim Parks and published by Archipelago Books, New York, 2013
Copyright © Editions Stock 2014
Translation copyright © Willard Wood 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
Publisher’s Note:
This is a work of fiction. Although many of the characters are based on historical or actual figures, they are characters in a novel and not to be confused with actual persons, living or dead.
A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 78283 200 3
for Laura
Sometimes the directions we take in our lives can be decided by the combination of a few words.
— Antonio Tabucchi, The Woman of Porto Pim
AUTHOR’S NOTE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION
Pierre Lazareff, editor of France Soir, the great French daily paper of the 1960s, once asked his friend Blaise Cendrars if he had really taken the Trans-Siberian Railway to write his Prose of the Trans-Siberian. The poet’s answer came rocketing back, “What the hell does it matter, as long as I made you take it?” Constellation is unequivocally a novel, a truelife novel to probe the fiction at the heart of our lives, that ever more inventive, surprising, and unexpected reality. In its original and full meaning, the novel is “a fabulous work based on the most singular adventures in the life of man”. (Sade, Reflections on the Novel)
1Orly Airport
I am the colossal drill Boring into the startled husk of the night.
— Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Pope’s Monoplane
On this night of October 27, 1949, on the tarmac at Orly, Air France’s F-BAZN is waiting to receive thirty-seven passengers departing for the United States. A year earlier, Marcel Cerdan stepped off the plane as the newly crowned middleweight boxing champion of the world, a title he had wrested from Tony Zale. And on that October 7, 1948, the crowd lifted him on their shoulders in triumph. A year later, inside the airport with his manager, Jo Longman, and his friend Paul Genser, Cerdan is setting off to win back his title, now in the hands of Jake LaMotta, the Bronx Bull. There is no question that in December, on another Constellation, he will bring the title back with him. In the departure hall at Orly, he blusters to the journalists: “That title’s coming home with me. I’m going to fight like a lion.” Lion against Bull, a matter of signs and constellations. The Lion of Nemea vs. the Minotaur, mythical poster for December 2, 1949, at Madison Square Garden.
Jo Longman is wearing his bad-day face. They’d had to do everything in a hurry, cancel the passage on the ocean liner, claim priority seating on the Paris–New York flight, the whole can of worms, just to meet with Édith Piaf early the next morning. “Bring that title back with you!” says an Air France employee. “That’s the whole idea of going!” says Marcel. “Ye-es,” mutters Jo, who can’t help adding, “If you’d listened to me, we’d have waited a few days. Jesus! We’re sneaking off like thieves, almost. On Tuesday we learned the match was set for December 2, yesterday we were still out in the provinces, and today we barely had time to pack our bags. I said we should stay on for a week, attend the meet at the Palais des Sports. But no, that was too simple, and tomorrow you’ll be rampaging around because, surprise surprise, in the rush to leave you’ll have forgotten half your stuff.” His anger is mock anger, they are used to playing at mutual recrimination, Marcel the amused free spirit and Jo the unheeded professional. In a few minutes, their elbows resting on the Air France bar, they’ll laugh about it. Since the trainer Lucien Roupp quit, Jo has climbed in rank. Always in sunglasses, his hair pomaded, Jo Longman — who founded the Club des Cinq, the cabaret-restaurant where Édith and Marcel met — is the image of the louche character. The boxer likes his gift of the gab, his love of partying and head for business, finds him the perfect companion on long trips between Paris, New York, and Casablanca.
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The “Aeroplane of the Stars” is living up to its name today. Besides the “Casablanca Clouter,” the violin virtuoso Ginette Neveu is also setting off to conquer America. The tabloid France-soir organizes an impromptu photo session in the departure lounge. In the first snapshot, Jean Neveu stands in the centre smiling at his sister, while Marcel holds the Stradivarius and Ginette grins across at him. Next, Jo takes Jean Neveu’s place and, with his expert’s eye, compares the violinist’s small hands with the boxer’s powerful paws.
Then on the tarmac, at the foot of the gangway, the two celebrities continue their conversation. Ginette gives the details of her tour: Saint Louis, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York. Marcel offers her front-row seats for his rematch at Madison Square Garden and promises to attend the concert at Carnegie Hall on November 30. Maybe they can have dinner together at the Versailles, the cabaret where the Little Sparrow has been packing the house for months.
The four enormous Wright engines of Lockheed Constellation F-BAZN are droning. The propellers and blades have been inspected, and the eleven crew members line up in front of the plane. The big, beautiful aircraft, its aluminium fuselage perched on its outsized undercarriage, looks like a wading bird. In the boarding queue are thirty-two other passengers: John and Hanna Abbott, Mustapha Abdouni, Eghline Askhan, Joseph Aharony, Jean-Pierre Aduritz, Jean-Louis Arambel, Françoise and Jenny Brandière, Bernard Boutet de Monvel, Guillaume Chaurront, Thérèse Etchepare, Edouard Gehring, Remigio Hernandores, Simone Hennessy, René Hauth, Guy and Rachel Jasmin, Kay and Ketty Kamen, Emery Komios, Ernest Lowenstein, Amélie Ringler, Yaccob Raffo, Maud Ryan, Philip and Margarida Sales, Raoul Sibernagel, Irene Sivanich, Jean-Pierre Suquilbide, Edward Supine, and James Zebiner. Left behind are two newlyweds, Edith and Philip Newton, returning home from their honeymoon, and Mme Erdmann. The three were bumped when the champion received priority seating.
2A Dakota in Casablanca
Modern life allows for travel but delivers no adventure.
— Jean Mermoz, Mes vols (My flights)
With bad weather reported over the Channel and the North Atlantic, the pilot, Jean de la Noüe, decides to alter the flight plan. In place of a stopover in Shannon, Ireland, the plane will refuel on the small island of Santa Maria in the Azores archipelago. The flight crew initiates the departure sequence; head high, the big bird taxis from the embarkation area towards the runway. The Curtiss propellers rumble in rhythm.
Pilot to control tower: “F-BAZN requests clearance for takeoff.”
Tower to pilot: “Clearance granted, F-BAZN.”
At 20:06 hours, the Constellation takes flight.
Soon the Atlantic, in six hours the airfield at Santa Maria, then Newfoundland, and tomorrow morning New York.
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Almost six years after he joined the Free French Forces in London, Jean de La Noüe still thrills at the memory of his truant years flying rust buckets, at first British, then American.
He never could stomach the Phoney War and its aftermath. Still, he had taken his wife’s advice and resumed work during the Occupation as a pilot for Air France, but the pill had grown progressively harder to swallow. He knew that it was all happening in London, and he wasn’t there. In Pléneuf-Val-André, his village on the Brittany coast, the English cliffs in the distance, Free France and Radio London. To take service again over the Channel, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, anywhere, as long as he was in the skies and on the right side. He had been only five years old when the armistice of the Great War was signed in a railway carriage in a forest clearing in Rethondes, and it was after discovering the exploits of the Dunkirk fighter squadron that he caught the aviation bug. His hero: Charles Nungesser, who disappeared over the Atlantic with François Coli while attempting a nonstop crossing in L’Oiseau blanc the year Jean turned fifteen. A pirate of the skies, Nungesser had painted his pilot’s insignia on the fuselage of his two-seater, a Nieuport 17: a black heart encircling a skull and crossbones and a coffin set between two candles. Jean didn’t have the makings of a hero, but he was no deserter. Demobilized in 1940, he had been sorry to exchange enemy lines for a commercial airline. In 1943, on his umpteenth flight, Jean bolted and joined the Free French Forces. After the Allied landing in North Africa, he was assigned to transport soldiers from Casablanca to the Italian front. His aircraft was a Dakota, which the British pilots called the “Gooney Bird”, or albatross, for its ungainliness on the ground and majesty in the skies.
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Those flights over the Mediterranean were a long time ago, the best years of his life, he often said. The capture of Pantelleria Island on June 10, 1943, then Linosa, Lampedusa, and the celebrated invasion of Sicily. Thirty-eight days of ferrying forces from the advanced base on Pantelleria, twenty-eight men to a Dakota. And leaving in his wake, as he shuttled back and forth, traceries of parachute canopies in the sky. Operation Avalanche on Salerno, and Slapstick to take the port of Taranto. The great battle, Monte Cassino, would come on May 11, 1944. Then parachute drops over Provence. In Casablanca, the Allied rear base, Jean would return to life. History was in the making, and he was part of it, an extra in the great theatre of operations organized by Churchill and Roosevelt at the Casablanca Conference. De Gaulle, Giraud, a few demobilized veterans from the French Naval Air Force, and the French Army, which was now the second blade of the Allied operation — all these men, tenacious and battle-hardened, hungered for revenge and reconquest. In the postwar years, he brought his wife to the Max Linder cinema to see Casablanca with Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart. He took exception to the casbah, so much at variance with his own recollections, and laughed out loud at the singing of the Marseillaise led by the resistance fighter Laszlo. Total joke. Walking back up the boulevard Poissonnière, he described his Casablanca to Aurore. The hotel in the Anfa district and the restaurant with the panoramic view. The palm groves around Camp Cazes airfield and the barracks where the pilots were packed together. The runway, which features as the final set of the film, where Rick Blaine and Captain Renault celebrate the beginning of a beautiful friendship. He told her too about the history of the Moroccan airmail service, about the exploits of Mermoz and Saint-Exupéry, flying over the desert, over sand dunes, where you see nothing, hear nothing, and beauty is hidden in immensity.
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On the night of October 27, 1949, Jean de La Noüe, captain aboard F-BAZN, has sixty thousand flight hours and eighty-eight transatlantic crossings to his credit. Next to him are Charles Wolfer and Camille Fidency, two former combat pilots. Since hostilities ended there has been no front to receive these soldiers. Like Jean, they chose not to pursue a career in naval aviation, adapting instead to this new line of commercial work. Assigned to the same flights, the two have become friends. And born the same hour on December 4, 1920, they are known in the company as the “astrological twins”. Soon, between stopovers, they will celebrate their twenty-ninth birthday. The radio is manned by Roger Pierre and Paul Giraud, the navigator is Jean Salvatori. And André Villet and Marcel Sarrazin, mechanics, complete the flight crew.
3The Signal is Erratic
The aeroplane! The aeroplane! May it climb to the sky,
Soar over the peaks, and cross the watery divide.— Guillaume Apollinaire, “L’Avion” in Poèmes retrouvés
(Rediscovered poems)
“The new comet from Air France,” read the advertising brochures. The Constellation was going to supplant luxury ocean liners and establish the dominance of air over sea. A chrome-plated bird born of the folly of one man, Howard Hughes.
The majority shareholder of Trans World Airlines, Hughes had launched the project to build the “Connie” in 1939. Working with Lockheed Aircraft, the film and aviation magnate proposed a new gamble: a pressurized four-engine passenger plane capable of travelling 3,500 miles in one hop. He drew the plans freehand, his sketches guided by a taste for elegance and eroticism, leaving to the engineers the task of adapting them to the laws of aeronautics. During that same period, for the shooting of The Outlaw, Hughes designed a cantilevered bra with steel undercup rods that turned Jane Russell’s breasts into missiles aimed at the screen and at the leagues of public decency.
Initially brought into the U.S. Army Air Force programme and used for troop transport between continents, the Constellation logged its first commercial flight in 1944 when, with its eccentric billionaire at the controls, it shattered existing records by flying from Burbank, California, to Washington, D.C., in six hours and fifty-seven minutes. On February 15, 1946, the producer–aviator invited a group of Hollywood luminaries on a nonstop flight from New York to Los Angeles. At an altitude of twenty-five thousand feet, flanked by Paulette Goddard and Linda Darnell, and holding a megaphone in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other, Hughes presented his new toy. With the Constellation and its stars, aviation was entering an era of aluminized luxury. But though it was a symbol of the prop-driven transatlantic airliner at its zenith, the Connie’s early flights belied its eventual destiny. Singular law of series. On June 18, 1946, one of the four engines of a Pan Am Constellation caught fire. The pilot managed to remain in the air over the continental United States for eleven hours all the same. The Constellation, which the press dubbed “the best three-engine aircraft in the world”, suffered another accident twenty-three days later when a Connie made an emergency landing in a field, killing five of its six passengers. As a precaution, all Constellations were grounded until Lockheed could effect the necessary changes. Once the adjustments were made, a few months later, the Constellation again received its certificate of airworthiness and established itself as the premier long-range aircraft for transport companies worldwide. Among them was Air France, once privately held but now nationalized, which ordered thirteen planes from Lockheed. The first Air France Constellation, registration number F-BAZA, took off from La Guardia Airport on July 9, 1946, Roger Loubry its captain. Starting on October 8, 1947, when Air France inaugurated its “Golden Comet” luxury service, the carrier could boast of being the only airliner to offer sleeping berths on transatlantic routes, reducing the sixteen-hour flight to a long night’s sleep.
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Once the French coastline is behind them, the stewardess, Suzanne Roig, and the two stewards, Albert Brucker and Raymond Redon, busy themselves around the cabin. Marcel Cerdan, after a brief courtesy visit to the cockpit, sits next to his friend Paul Genser. In front of them is Jo Longman, in conversation with the journalist René Hauth, editor in chief of an Alsace daily newspaper. The latter is asking about the champion’s physical condition, his regimen, the training camp they have chosen, and any concerns the manager might have, for a dispatch he’ll telegraph to his editors from New York in the morning. A golden opportunity to gather firsthand information in mid-flight. Air travel’s happy coincidences bring about the most improbable encounters. In the back of the plane, Jean and Ginette Neveu talk in undertones and meet their neighbour, Edward Supine, a lace importer from Brooklyn returning from a business trip to Calais. Somewhat embarrassed, he admits to not knowing much about music but promises to listen to one of their recordings and asks the virtuoso to spell her name. Guy Jasmin, four seats back, starts reading Moby-Dick, which he bought the previous day at the Gallimard bookstore on the boulevard Raspail. The opening words are unmistakably engaging: “Je m’appelle Ishmaël. Mettons.” “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing in particular to interest me on the shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”
To his right, Ernest Lowenstein, who owns tanneries in France and Morocco, is still marvelling at being on the same flight as Marcel Cerdan. He manages to approach the champion and get his autograph in a notebook. The stewardess, wearing a pleated skirt, a navy-blue jacket, and a beret with the airline’s sea horse insignia, patrols the central aisle — on one side is a row of reclining seats and on the other curtained sleeping alcoves — passing out meal trays to the passengers: beef in aspic, lamb stew, and macarons, accompanied by champagne. Air France has been offering hot meals on its planes since September 30, a first for many of the passengers. The idea came from Max Hymans, the company’s president, who created the catering service at Orly a few months earlier, enlisting several great Parisian chefs for the venture.
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Thirteen thousand nine hundred feet above the Atlantic, the Constellation transmits its position to Orly at 21:00 hours and proceeds on a diagonal toward the Azores. The plane, travelling at 250 miles per hour, will reach the Santa Maria airport at 2:30 in the morning GMT. Its cruising speed attained, the aircraft seems to be soaring. In the pilot’s cabin, Jean de La Noüe lets go of the control column and puts his two copilots in charge. Communicating directly with Air France’s operation centre, Roger Pierre reads out the weather report.
“Captain, Paris has just confirmed the flight plan radioed to Santa Maria. A low-pressure system is expected over the islands at arrival time, with limited visibility on the ground.”
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